“Fire The Bastards!”: The Great Defender of William Gaddis

William Gaddis, in the closing pages of his colossal 1955 novel “The Recognitions,” inserts a brief scene that manages to be at once rancorously funny, brazenly self-referential, and spookily prescient about the critical fate that lay in store for his work. A book reviewer and a poet meet in a tailor’s shop; both are sitting pantsless while they wait for their respective garments to be adjusted. The poet notices an unusually thick book under the critic’s arm and asks him if he’s reading it. No, says the critic, he’s not reading it, “just reviewing it.” He complains that he’s getting paid “a lousy twenty-five bucks for the job” and that “it’ll take me the whole evening tonight.” He then tells his acquaintance that he hopes he hasn’t gone and bought the book. “Christ,” he says, “I could have given it to you, all I need is the jacket blurb to write the review.”

Though the name of the book is never mentioned, it’s fairly obviously “The Recognitions.” It’s as though Gaddis was already convinced, before he even completed his nine hundred and fifty-six-page début, that the novel was going to be treated with contempt or indifference by the literary press, and had decided to work in this gag as a sort of futile, preëmptive revenge on the critics who would never get far enough into the text to notice. His apparent pessimism was borne out: the book was reviewed quite widely, but the overwhelming majority of reviews were either dismissive of its blatant ambition or frustrated by its length and frequent impenetrability. As the novelist William H. Gass put it in his introduction to the 1993 edition of the book, “Its arrival was duly newsed in fifty-five papers and periodicals. Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid.”

The tone of Gass’s introduction might seem unusually truculent, but it’s more or less the standard when it comes to the topic of “The Recognitions” and its treatment by American critics. Upholders of the book’s honor tend to be unambiguous about its status as a criminally underrated masterpiece; the literary establishment of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, they argue, slept on a classic (in some cases perhaps literally). Over the last half-century or so, however, the book—a vast exploration of the themes of fraudulence and authenticity in art and human relationships—has come to be regarded as a foundational postmodern novel. Rick Moody, for instance, called it “one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century,” claiming that he “read it and reread it with the same reverence I reread ‘Moby-Dick’ or ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” In an essay for the magazine in 2002, Jonathan Franzen described it as “the ur-text of postwar fiction,” and acknowledged that he’d named “The Corrections,” his own third novel, “partly in homage to it.”

With this history, “The Recognitions” has just been reissued by Dalkey Archive Press, a small independent publisher that specializes in innovative fiction. In particular, the press has a strong association with the American postmodern avant garde, having published the likes of Gass, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Barth, David Markson, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Given the importance of “The Recognitions” for so many of these writers, it’s arguable that Dalkey Archive has always been a kind of spiritual home for Gaddis anyway.

The press has also republished a book called “Fire the Bastards!” to coincide with the Gaddis reissue. It’s a unique text. Originally published in 1962 under the name Jack Green, the book is essentially a seventy-nine-page harangue against the critics whom he saw as having utterly failed to recognize the greatness of “The Recognitions.” Green was the publisher of, and sole contributor to, a literary periodical called “newspaper” (the aversion to capital letters is carried over into the text itself). Green was the pseudonym of a New Yorker named Christopher Carlisle Reid, who apparently quit his job as an actuary after reading “The Recognitions” in order to become a freelance proofreader—a pungent irony, given his approach to the written word (there’s a piece about Green and the confusions around his identity at the Paris Review Daily). He dedicated three whole issues to attacking the novel’s reviewers, both as a group and as individuals, and it’s these indictments that make up the text of “Fire the Bastards!” Here’s how the book opens:

william gaddis’s the recognitions was published in 1955 its a great novel, as much the novel of our generation as ulysses was of its it only sold a few thousand copies because the critics did a lousy job –

– 2 critics boasted they didnt finish the book – one critic made 7 boners others got wrong the number of pages, year, price, publisher, author, & title – & other incredible boners like mistaking a diabetic for a narcotics addict – one critic stole part of his review from the blurb, part from another review – one critic called the book “disgusting” “evil” “foul-mouthed,” needs “to have its mouth washed out with lye soap” others were contemptuous or condescending -2 of 55 reviews were adequate the others were amateurish & incompetent failing to recognize the greatness of the book failing to convey to the reader what the book is like, what its essential qualities are counterfeiting this with stereotyped preconceptions-the standard cliches about a book that is ”ambitious,” “erudite,” “long,” “negative,” etc -constructive suggestion: fire the bastards!

Given the sustained intensity of Green’s rage and his Spartan abstention from any indulgence in punctuation, it’s tempting at first to write him off as a lit-crit crank, a slightly unstable fanboy with a thriving colony of bees in his bonnet. But what is striking about the book is the way in which the deliberate, aggressive sloppiness of its style belies the extraordinary sharpness of its perceptions. Reading “Fire the Bastards!,” I found myself continually thinking of that scene in Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road” in which Frank and April Wheeler, the pretentious bourgeois couple at the center of the novel, have their self-delusions violently punctured by John Givings, the unbalanced but ruthlessly insightful son of their next-door neighbors. (In the unlikely event of a William Gaddis biopic, Michael Shannon—who played John in the 2008 film adaptation of “Revolutionary Road”—would make an excellent Jack Green.)

In the opening pages, Green mentions that he first learned about “The Recognitions” from a “Briefly Noted” review in The New Yorker. He calls the review “vicious,” but that’s a characteristic overstatement. The anonymous New Yorker critic was clearly not impressed, and compared the novel unfavorably to “Ulysses,” as did many early critics. Green remarks that the review motivated him to seek out Gaddis’s novel on the grounds that “a book could fall short of ulysses & still be pretty good.” It is his contention throughout, however, that “The Recognitions” does deserve to be considered alongside “Ulysses,” and that the “literary parasites” and “enemies of art” he’s attacking here would have been just as dismissive of Joyce’s masterpiece had they been charged with reviewing it in 1922. Green goes on to methodically and forensically examine review after “criminally negligent” review, exposing the shoddiness, laziness, and (in many cases) casual plagiarism of Gaddis’s critics. At one point, he does a line-by-line analysis of a review that appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal, reading it alongside the jacket copy of the first edition of “The Recognitions.” It is wincingly apparent that the former is almost a straight transcription of the latter, and that the critic hasn’t read the book he’s reviewing.

“Fire the Bastards!” is a fascinating document of a quixotic campaign against the entire U.S. critical establishment of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, a literary “J’Accuse” composed in a hot sweat of savage indignation. It’s less a defense of an underrated novel per se than it is an attack on that novel’s critics. He responds to descriptions of it as a “difficult” book (an incontrovertible claim, surely) by facetiously suggesting that “poetry should be translated to ny times style so you get the literal meaning without difficulty.” This is pretty typical of Green’s argumentative style; he is forever hastily constructing straw men in order to shove them down slippery slopes, yet this somehow makes for a compelling intellectual blood sport.

If “The Recognitions” had been published fifty years later, “Fire the Bastards!” would probably be a Tumblr, and Green would be all over Twitter like a bad rash, trolling critics to within an inch of their lives. It seems to me that he overstates the case for the novel’s greatness—he refers to it at one point as “one of the most entertaining books ever written,” which is one thing it most certainly isn’t—but that doesn’t diminish the thrill of reading this broadside. The copyright page of “Fire the Bastards!” attributes the book to “Green, Jack, 1928 -”, so Green (or Reid) is apparently still with us. It’s not inconceivable that he checks in on this magazine’s Web site every now and then. So I anticipate, with equal parts terror and delight, the appearance of an unpunctuated and devastatingly effective character assassination in the comments below.

Photograph of William Gaddis by Isolde Ohlbaum/Laif/Redux.

Mark O’Connell is Slate’s books columnist, and a staff writer for The Millions.